One
of the stranger aspects of the hold
that the Golden Dawn (GD) has over the Western Mystery Tradition is its
use
of
Tarot.
Many groups that
derived from the
Golden Dawn, such as Builders of the Adytum (BOTA) and Dion Fortunes'
Inner
Light made
extensive use of Tarot and many of the ideas behind the classic Tarot
deck come
from the Golden Dawn's attributions.I
say this is strange because the Golden Dawn never actually built its
own Tarot
deck.

GD
members were presented with images of
some of the Major Arcana Tarot keys in the Outer Order and in the Inner
Order
were given details of the court cards and Minor Arcana. But
until the Rider-Waite deck was released
there was nothing close to the Golden Dawn symbolism around. This meant
that
when a Golden Dawn adept was supposed to be using the tarot cards as an
important part of their Inner Order work they had to use more
traditional
decks.

In
the Outer Order the tarot keys were
presented as line drawings only and were not
coloured. The reason for this was that the colour
attributions of the Golden Dawn were considered Inner Order only and
not for the uninitiated.

Responding to this call,
Robert Felkin approached Golden Dawn
chief, Wynn Westcott to flesh out a more
complete pack. Westcott worked on the Court Cards but seems to have
provided Felkin with an outline for what was left of
the Major Keys. Felkin worked the cards into
his own Stella Matutina (SM) order and in particular Whare Ra in New
Zealand. It
is the instructions for this set which Israel Regardie was trained to
use in the Bristol temple and was mostly
used by Robert Wang. Regardie's personal cards are shown in his The
Complete
Golden Dawn System of Magic.[1]

Despite my contacts with
some of the
older
members of Whare Ra I have not found a coloured deck amongst them. Some
of this seems to be because in the 1960s
many members of Whare Ra joined Builders of the Adytum and replaced
their
Golden Dawn sets with Paul Foster Case's version and colour scheme. The
only versions I have seen of the original
deck were on small pieces of yellow card and were simple crude line
drawings. It
is easy to see on
this
basis why Whare Ra adepts junked their Golden Dawn cards in favour of
BOTA
versions.

The
first complete Golden Dawn deck was
designed by Robert Wang with help from Israel Regardie. This
was the first to show a system of
colouring and was mostly based on the
Stella Matutina model. Tabatha
Cicero's Golden Dawn Ritual Tarot was
the next to follow and used another system of colouring and symbolism.
Tabatha
also used some attributions and
imagery which was not from the SM deck but based on her own research.

Both
decks have something to offer the
Golden Dawn student, but there was a feeling within the Horus Hathor
temple
that it would be a statement
of our own egregore if we created a tarot
deck
which featured some of our ideas. Initially the idea was
that we would create our own Tarot icons for the
initiations but the idea grew.

I
was lucky to work with the talented
magical artist Harry Wendrich and his wife Nicola, who run the Wendrich
art
studio in Wales[2].
Both
are magicians. To
make this work, we
had
to create a Tarot deck which was true to the outline used in the
original
Golden Dawn. The
various rituals
give
specific instructions about what these cards should look like and I was
not
keen to depart from these descriptions because it would mean making
changes to
the ritual. >However where something
was
not described we would lean towards the SM deck unless we could come up
with a
better idea. Again we wanted to
cover
the same symbols of the SM deck but look at them in a more modern way.
We
also wanted to use the full colour system
of the Golden Dawn.

The
first goal was to create a set of
Major
Arcana for the elemental grades so that we could initiate people onto a
set
that came from within our own group mind. We listed what had to
go into the card from the ritual and then any
ideas that I had about the card. Harry
would then meditate on these symbols and see what ideas he had and what
would
actually work on paper.

For example the 2=9
ritual says:

Within
the oval formed of 72
circles is a
female form, nude save for a scarf that
floats around her. She is
crowned with
the lunar crescent
of Isis
and hold in her hands two wands.
Her
legs form a cross. She is the bride of
the Apocalypse,
the Kabbalistic Queen of the
Canticles, the Egyptian Isis or Great Feminine Kerubic Angel Sandalphon
on the
left had of the Mercy Seat of the Ark.

The
wands are the directing forces of the
positive and negative currents and the seven pointed Heptagram or star
alludes
to the seven palaces of Assiah, the Crossed legs to the symbol of the
four
letters of the Name. The surmounting
crescent
alike receives the influences of Geburah and Gedulah. She
is a synthesis of the 32nd
Path united Malkuth to Yesod. The
oval of 72 smaller circles refers to
the
Schemhamporesh, or the 72 lettered name of the Deity. The
12 larger circles form the Zodiac and at
the angels are the four Kerubim.[3]

The
card is important because it is
represents both the beginning and end
of the path of esoteric work. I
had been increasingly interested in the
Golden Dawn teaching of the Sphere of Sensation and realised when
looking at
the various versions of the card that what was being depicted was the
perfected
adept. This
adept stood
between the
pillars of manifestation, just as the candidate did in the 0=0 ritual.
This
is a crucial part of the 0=0 because it
is the point where they are overshadowed by their Higher Self. I
suggested we change her wands so that she
was holding small versions of the black and white pillars. They
remain a directing force of positive and
negative energy, but take on the duel symbolism. While we were
suggesting that
part of the 0=0 rite, the Golden Hexagram representing the Higher Self,
should
be represented as being between the pillars. This is similar to
the
Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram where the operator
says “Between the columns is the six rayed star.”
Next I suggested that the
oval represented by the Schemhamporesh was the boundary of a perfected
Sphere
of Sensation. As a symbol the card could be seen as a microcosmic
vision of a
perfected person dancing within the constraints of matter, or it could
be seen
as macrocosmic vision of the Goddess of Nature with the Higher Self in
her womb
giving birth to higher life.

I
wanted her
to appear
cosmic and so
suggested that she be dancing with a spiral-armed Galaxy behind her.

I
turned my notes over to Harry who
meditated on the symbols and he suggested making her dance on a cube of
Saturn,
for which the path is attributed. He
also came up with the idea of using Celtic knotwork instead of spheres
from the
Schemhamporesh spheres. He felt that Celtic
knotwork represented the flow of energy better. He also placed the
hexagram in the womb of the Goddess on the basis that
she was nurturing the Higher Self into manifestation. Instead
of traditional astrological signs,
Harry liked the idea of star patterns, which went well with the idea of
her
being a star goddess.

One
'official' thing that did get
changed,
which makes it slightly different from the ritual, was instead of a
seven
pointed star, she has a crown of seven stars. This
was the sort of
mistake which was born of creativity I was
following the symbolism of her being the Bride of the Apocalypse, as
being
Nature and Venus. Once
Harry had painted
seven stars above her crown I felt it was a good idea to stay.

Other
things that flowed their way into
the
mix was the veil shaped like the Hebrew letter Kaph, which is an idea I
nicked
from Paul Foster Case's Builders of the Adytum tarot. When
we finished it was agreed to frame each
card with the colour of the path in the Queen Scale to assist people
who
meditate on the cards. This idea was copied
again from BOTA .

Colouring
of the card also required a
moving away from Whare Ra's system. According
to Pat and
Chris Zalewski[4]
the
colours which should be used for Key 21
were darkest indigo blue, soft black, blue black, black rayed blue and
the complementaries
of these. However I felt that this would also miss some important uses
of
colour in the card. For example the
Schemhamporesh knotwork, the colours of the Zodiac spheres, the Golden
hexagram
would end up as a very dark wash of Saturnian colours. While
being a purist approach might highlight
one teaching, it would bury other. For
example the dancer in blue and black would look too much like a corpse
than a
vibrant archetype of nature. As far as
colours were concerned we would lean towards the official ones, but if
a more
important symbol required a different colour we would use it.

The
final result was a card which might
have looked similar, but was not the same from any other deck that went
before
it.

We
followed Tabatha's idea of creating
two
different versions of the Temperance card[5].
This
is important for the ritual use of the
deck, where both the 'old' and the 'new' versions are shown even if it
is less
useful from the aspect of divination.

Perhaps
the most obvious difference
between
the Horus Hathor deck and the other Golden Dawn tarots is the Fool
card. Although
various Golden Dawn paperwork made
references to the traditional Fool as walking off a cliff, the Whare Ra
deck
came up with a much more esoteric symbol. It used a baby,
holding
a wolf by a chain, while it picked fruit from a
tree. While
we liked this
idea we were
also drawn to the more traditional image too. Thus we decided to
integrate the symbols. Our fool is climbing
a
cliff. Below
is manifestation
and he is reaching
across an abyss to reach for fruit. Obviously this is a
stupid thing as his quest for knowledge will result
in him falling.

The card can be read as
a
soul before it
comes into manifestation, or after the path is completed. The
fool's intellectual knowledge, in the
form of outer order course work, is rejected and discarded in his
search for
real knowledge found by picking the fruit. The wolf is still
there, but rather than it being tamed, as the Whare Ra
deck suggests, or an annoying dog, as the Rider Waite deck hints, it
has been
made into a skin for the spiritual man which the Fool represents. In
other words, the animal personality, and
the intellect, has a use, but at this stage of the persons development,
the
Higher Self is so integrated and in control that the personality is
simply a
garment.

Harry
thought that this gave the Fool
card
a more shamanic feel, and certainly the idea of a more primitive form
of magic
is suggested here. If you look at why
Shamans wore such skins then the reason is at one with the idea of this
card.

Another
Major Arcana key which will be
transformed is that of the Hierophant. I
feel that the Golden Dawn was trying to say something important when
they
changed the name of this key from The Pope. By linking the card
in
with the officers of the 0=0 ritual they were
moving it away from its traditional symbolism of the Papacy. Rather
than making a complete transformation,
they changed the name but kept much of the symbolism associated with
the Pope
including his tiara and Crook. In our
version the transformation to the Hierophant will be complete and he
will have
his wand, and Egyptian head-dress. Other
cards linked to officers from the 0=0 ritual will also have their
imaginary
strengthened. The
Devil has the
Hiereus banner,
the Justice Card is more obviously the Hegemon, and the Hermit, the
Kerux.

Both
Harry and I felt it important to
express the idea of energy in the cards. This becomes seen in
the Sun and the Tower cards. The rituals describe
a
wall in the Sun card
before which the children dance. This
wall is supposed to be the beginning of a new universe born out of the
death of
the old one in the Tower key. Harry made
the wall out of geometric shapes and placed the children as dancing in
rays of
light. This
is a marked
contrast to the
grey bricks which are destroyed by the tower and suggest that the
pattern that
an adept builds is more abstract and refined than the one built by
normal
people. When
Harry draw the
Tower card
he made the ball from which the lightning flash comes out of the same
geometric
shapes, suggesting that the cosmic pattern is replacing the pattern
made by
humanity.

In
the cards which are presented to the
candidate in the elemental grades, characters standing in grade signs
are depicted.
For example the child in the Judgement card is standing in the grade
sign of
the 2=9 which is the grade they are when they
enter
the 3=8 initiation. Likewise Hecate is depicted in the Moon card, which
is
presented in the 4=8 ritual, in the grade sign of the 3=8. The
idea is that the cards should be wired
into the initiation rite.

While
Harry worked on the Major Arcana
Nicola started work on the Minor keys. The Golden Dawn Book
'T' gave very good descriptions of the Tarot cards
but stopped short on the colour scheme. Each card represented
one of the four elements so the logical sequence
would be fire would be red; water, blue; air, yellow and earth black.
However
the GD did not just see the elements
as being physical representations. They
represented each of the four worlds of the kabbalists. Fire
was the world of Atzaluth while Earth
was Assiah. Each
card was also
allocated
a sphere on the Tree of Life. The Aces
were attributed to Kether; the twos, Chockmah; threes to Binah, for
example.

The
GD also allocated its colour scale
to
each of the four levels. The King Scale
was Atzaluth, the Queen was Briah. The
elements seemed to be represented by the weapons of each suit while the
colour
scheme of the back should be the colour in the appropriate scale of the
sphere
on the tree of life. So the six of wands
would be rose, the six of swords, gold, the six of cups pink, and the
six of
disks tawny yellow. We used the same
colour in the frame of the card.

The
decans were an important part of the
Golden Dawn tarot with the sign of the planet at the top and the sign
of the
zodiac at the bottom. There has been a
bit of confusion about the GD attributions to the decans because often
they
don't appear to be connected to the title of the card. Why
should Venus in Aquarius mean “defeat”
for example. Astrologically Venus
in
Aquarius people are off beat and independent. There is nothing to
indicate a defeat to the extent suggested by the
five of swords. However
with decans on
the tarot card it is important to see the energies in a slightly
different
way. It
is the energy of
Aquarius expressed
through the planet Venus in the
sphere of Geburah. In other words the
Aquarian energy is focused
through the passive lens of Venus. Venus
is passion, love and active and is not going to have much in common
with the
aloof and mental Aquarian. If you focus
Aquarian energies through a Venusian lens the good parts of the
Aquarian ray
such as its intellectualism will be warmed up by the fires of passion
and castrated. When this neutered
energy is expressed in
Geboric conflict it will be the same feeling you get when you have lost
a
battle. Let
us look at another
one.

Why
would Saturn in Pisces have the
title
“Abandoned Success?” Astrologically
Saturn is not happy in Pisces, but ironically many Pisces love order
because
they fear what happens if they lose control. But the picture changes
completely
when you think of the energies of Pisces being focused through the
constricting
lens of Saturn. All
the emotion and
deep
spiritual essence which makes Pisces energy useful is catalogued and
robbed of
its soul by Saturn. But what energy does
come through unchecked is the Piscean tendency towards melancholy and
the
desire to run away. In the intellectual
Hod
this leads a person to see their deepest beliefs become stale, and lead
to a
desire to move away from thought processes which might have been good
and
useful.

In
the Horus Hathor Deck we decided to
put
the divine name of the appropriate sephiroth onto the card. This
is to aid in meditation and pathworkings
and further empowers the card magically. Although we were
tempted to put the name of the two Schemhamporesh
angels on the card too there was simply not enough room.

What
surprised me when Nicola showed me
the
cards was how vibrant the colours turned out and the clarity of the
images is a
tribute to her artwork.

At
time of going to press we are yet to
create our first court cards. We left
these last mostly because I have been researching them and am not yet
happy
with the results. Some of this is the fault of the Golden Dawn's Book T
which
created opposing instructions.

Firstly
there are the titles. You
have Knight, Queen, King and Knave in one
section and then you have King, Queen, Prince and Princess in another.

In
the description of the cards in one
section of Book T makes the statement that “The four Kings,
or figures mounted
on steeds...”... and “the Princes are seated in
Chariots” which is later
countered by the description of the “Knight of Wands... a
winged warrior riding
upon a black horse” and King of Wands
“A
kingly figure seated on a chariot”. Then in another
section
the 'King' is referred to by the mystic title
'Prince of the Chariot of Fire'.

Different
Golden Dawn teachers have used
different systems. The Zalewski's and Crowley
put the King in a Chariot, Tabatha Cicero and Wang puts the Prince on a
Chariot.

Wang says the reason
for
this is because
of
a mystery.

“There
appears to be a
contradiction. The
King is called a
Knight, the Prince is
called the King and the Princess is called a Knave. Essentially
Mathers was pointing to the way
the older writers attributed (the Tetragrammaton) to the Court cards.
But
the principle show was one of the great
secrets of the Golden Dawn....”[6]

In
an idea which looks like it is
borrowed
from Crowley's
Book of Thoth, Wang says that the King, mounted on a horse is the first
Young
Knight. He
becomes the King and
marries
the daughter of the old King. He is the
vital principle as it pours forth into existance. The
Queen is his consort and the perfect
balance. From
their union come
the
Prince who is himself the new King and the immediate ruler over what we
know of
as existence. The Princes
forms
a union with the prince which brings about the activity of the King
whereby he
returns to being the young knight. Wang admits that this sounds
surrealistic
and demonstrates how difficult it can be to express anything in our
language.

Wang claims that only
Crowley
got it right. However in my view Crowley's
idea is too
complicated and does not actually reveal anything other than the fact
that he
clearly had a thing about sleeping with his mother.

The
Knight is not the primal root of the
element. That
job in Tarot is
firmly that
of the aces which are shown in the hands of the court cards. In
Tiphareth the Prince receives his
elemental power from Kether down the path ruled by the High Priestess,
so it
arrives with at the same primal level that the King and the Queen
receives. Symbolically
he is the
son of
the King and Queen so is therefore freer to express the elemental force
than
his mum and dad who have the responsibilities of their senior office.

Having
been around Golden Dawn documents
for a while, I think there is a much easier way of looking at the
contradiction. Many
people believe
that
the Golden Dawn ideas were written in stone and that there is something
like a
perfect version. Where
there were
inconsistencies, these were termed 'blinds'. But GD texts were often
reviewed
by the authors and adapted. Over the
period of years that the GD existed manuscripts were often reworked.
Any
one who writes a manuscript will tell you
that the more times it is worked on the more likely you are to have
mistakes. The
original idea is
often
lost, but resurfaces later in the work. This is the case in
Book T. Mathers
and Westcott
started with an idea changed their minds but the
original idea was not edited out from the earlier part of the text.

What
happened next is that people, such
as Crowley
and Wang, came
along and found reasons for the contradiction rather than deciding that
it was
simply a mistake. The
Crowley/Wang
reasoning then gets built into
the GD body of teaching.

Obviously
everyone can point to Book T
to
claim legitimacy so when we came up with our Court Cards we have to
work out
what we think really important.

Firstly
the issue of titles was decided
for
me by the fact that the GD said the Kings on Chocmah, the Queens
on Binah, the Princes on Tiphareth, and the Princesses on Malkuth.The
Kings were said to be Abba and the Queens
Aima.So
the King is father
and the
Queen is mother.The
Golden Dawn's
colour
scale is also called in order King, Queen, Prince and Princess.Book
T does mention that the term Knight or
Prince is acceptable.Obviously Knight
is connected to the traditional Tarot deck as is the term 'knave';
however
the world 'Prince' and 'Princess' works
better with the Golden Dawn colour scales and the polarity of a modern
deck.

Let
us look at the problem of the horse
and
the chariot. To
get the answer to
this
we have to look at the symbols involved. The use of the horse
made the chariot in warfare obsolete. Chariots
were too slow, difficult to turn,
and had limited fighting power.However
its use as a ceremonial ride of emperors continued until the fall of
the
Byzantine Empire in 1450AD.The Chariot
is a symbol of the state with the King holding the reigns. It is a
symbol which
is repeated in the Tarot key the Chariot.So
therefore the Kings
have to be in Chariots and the Princes, as
servants of the King, have to be on horses.

Before
moving from this point we have to
question if it stuffs up the symbols that are placed on the cards.It
works with Westcott's Whare Ra cards too.

As
far as colour is concerned, the court
cards are much more elemental than 'pip' cards.Therefore we will be
using the elemental colours of reds and their
complementaries for fire.There will be
some exceptions to this rule.The
elemental weapons will still remain in their consistent colours and
when Book T
specifies a particular colour we will use it, For example the Prince of
Wands
supposed to be riding a black horse.

I
am also keen to get some Enochian
symbolism into the court cards.The
Court cards are a vital part of the GD Enochian system because of their
Kerubic
nature.The
GD attributed them
to both the Tablet of Equilibrium and the Kerubic
squares on the Enochian tablets.Therefore some
symbolism relating to Enochian should be the key to
unlocking these energies when pathworking into the Enochian letters
which is an
important part of the work of the Zelator Adeptus Minor.At
present I am thinking working the Enochian
letters attributed to each court card from the Tablet of Equilibrium in
to the
picture.

Creating
a Golden Dawn Tarot has been an
interesting process for me.My
first
esoteric school was Paul Foster-Case's Builders of the Adytum where
what I
thought was the Golden Dawn tarot teachings was expanded to its highest
degree.However
working with
Harry and
Nicola I found that there were many things that Case taught that, if
they
worked at all, did not connect within a GD framework.In
other situations, such as the attribution
of the Higher Self to theHierophant
Key, Case
needed the Golden Dawn symbolism to make it work.So
in the creation of these cards I have had
to review all the knowledge I though I knew about the Tarot and start
from
scratch.In
doing so I have
uncovered a
stream of teaching which I didn't expect to find. When
the cards are completed I will be writing
a book to go with the deck and much of this information will find its
way into
it.

While
I think that claims that the esoteric
use of the Tarot go back beyond the 18th
century are bogus, there is
certainly something about the symbolism, which the GD developed which
aids in
the magical development of a person and provides access to a wealth of
esoteric
teaching.